Given the choice, I wouldn’t be a bear, though it’s tempting to skip this dark season and live off my fat. Far below the metabolic plane of sleep, my body would be as cold as death to the touch. Parts of the brain that dart about in REM sleep are turned off, brain functions reduced to heartbeat and breathing. There are no dreams down here, and you wake only to stir yourself to keep your kidneys from failing. Otherwise, you pass through winter without notice.
I tell you though, I’d miss four in the morning lying in bed with my eyes wide open, sky out the window seeded with stars as icicles crack the eaves. That’s something I want to be awake for.
I have a friend who hates winter. He loves the outdoors, romping with his wife and son every weekend, but when I say the word, he asks me not to say it again. In the middle of summer, he already feels winter spreading toward him like cold, black ink. Some people just don’t do well with it. I camped with him in the high desert a few Februaries ago, and snow skittered across us all night long. I woke around midnight and shined my headlamp around, barely seeing his sleeping bag through flurries of dry, hard flakes. In the morning, huddled around his cookstove with fingerless gloves, he said, “This sucks.”
I’ve always loved winter, anxious for it to come. Maybe it’s my attention span. Around the third month of every season, I’m ready for a change. The thing with winter, it lasts closer to four months at my Colorado latitude. Come February 1, I’ll be done with it.
I won’t lie, I’m pretty testy these days, egged on by quarantines. Emotionally variable. I check the news too often and find myself sitting on a step stool in the pantry for longer than one ought. It’s not that there isn’t work to do. I’ve been fortunate, my hands as busy as ever. Wood needs bringing in, oil lamps need filling, and paper everywhere is written on. There’s plenty to occupy the mind, but you start to wonder by early January if the sun is really coming back, or if it got stuck somewhere in the south. You wonder how long solar standstill lasts after December 21, because it’s starting to seem longer than usual.
I mean, not to cause alarm. The sun is coming back, right?
This winter feels harder than most. Some are taking it terribly, loved ones dying behind glass, food banks straining for rations. A number of prize egg-laying ducks went missing yesterday and people in a rural town near me are talking about who might have done it, rumors of meth and hunger on the rise. Whispers move quickly.
Summer talk seems frivolous. You can say anything and it drifts off like the smell of a pie cooling in an open window. Winter is a chant. You find yourself mumbling to yourself — more than usual. The air smells like ice.
After Winter Solstice, which is December 21, you’ll start to notice the light coming back, protracted at first as the sun creeps out of its standstill cycle. The sun’s declination scarcely changes for a couple weeks around solstice, which puts us about now. Sunrise at my latitude is currently 7:27 am, and will remain there for another six days. On the 11th of January, sunrise will be 7:26, three days later, 7:25, two days after that, 7:24. Soon it will be a minute earlier each day, then two minutes. In a month, I’ll have an extra hour of light.
If you want to check your own latitude, go to timeanddate.com.
But let’s not get distracted. January 4th is hardly the time to start thinking about the end of winter. Otherwise, I would have chosen to be a bear. Instead, I’m awake, eyes wide open, with Orion and the bright star Sirius in the middle of the sky.
Winter is the Hero’s Journey on an annual basis, a mandatory descent into the underworld. This is the place where monsters lie and you look through the darkened window with trepidation. Since it’s going to happen no matter what, you might as well love it, soak it in. It’s a long haul till spring.
Woodcut: Kanbara, yoru no yuk/Evening Snow at Kanbara, Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797-1858. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Solar standstill. Thank you for this term. I’ve never heard it before and it fits so nicely. It comes during the frenzy of light-worshipping, light-seeking holy days and by January 4, when the fog of festival handovers lifts, we can notice the sun returning. But, as you remind us, it’s a long haul. A great time to read a book … or write one.
Not being a wordsmith doesn’t preclude me from appreciating an artful presentation of words that succinctly beautifully catch the essence of something that many consider mundane. You brought delight to this moment in time.
I loved this. I am curious how your boys feel about winter? Do they like it as well? You are such a great dad and I love watching all the adventures. Thanks for a breath of fresh air (brrrr) this am.
For me, nothing is as calming as snowfall on a chilly night illuminated by a full moon. Deafening silence indeed.
Some humans live with what the shrinks call “seasonal affective disorder”. We have less energy in the low-light months – and more gloom. Others of us love our more peaceful brains in the dark months, and have learned to live with anxiety and irritability in summer. We are, after all, animals. We are, in our cells, creatures evolving to respond to the natural world in which we live – and, some of us know that our species is damaging that world beyond repair. We are killing that which is essential for joy.
As a young kid I delighted in our weekly trek to the local store where they made donuts…glazed donuts. The glaze looked like magic. During my 9th winter I encountered hoarfrost for the first time. I thought winter had glazed everything I encountered outside, like a glazed donut. I’ve anticipated and watched for hoarfrost in the 53 winters I’ve lived since that first time, encountering it perhaps less than a dozen times. But every winter I look forward to just the chance of the winter’s glaze. Today, in southeastern Wisconsin, I encountered the hoarfrost. I gazed at the glaze, smiling from my soul. I’m already looking forward to the chance I’ll see it again next winter.
Answering LaRiccia, my kids seem to adjust to every season, taking them in the way probably most kids do, one day at a time. My youngest is one of those who tries to wear flip flops all winter long. The last few days, he’s come back inside with pink, snow-caked feet.
I like the idea of winter, and I like winter light and winter skies and winter storms. The only thing I don’t like about winter is that, well, it gets COLD. I’m a lifelong resident/prisoner of the Phoenix metro area. Anything below about 50 degrees seems alarmingly cold to me, and the slightest breeze at that temperature is like an Arctic gale that freezes the breath in my lungs and the marrow in my bones. I really do appreciate winter’s respite from our long hot desert summers, and the special beauty that only winter can provide, but I’m with your grumpy friend who just doesn’t do well with any prolonged exposure to it.
A few years back we got a rare snowfall that melted off the next two days. I drive around photographing the remains of sagging snowmen built by delighted children. I cut the heart out of the last one and put it on a shelf in the freezer and watched it evaporate in the artificial winter that lives there. My negative file of lurching snowmen stands open, waiting, waiting, for the for the weather overlap that might turn the neighborhood white.
I love this essay …. I too love winter so very much. Especially love ” Wood needs bringing in, oil lamps need filling, and paper everywhere is written on.” Sending hugs over the mountains and across the mesas.
Nice, beautiful essay, and woodcut, Craig. This poem also came in today, interesting coincidence:
Snow Fall
by May Sarton
With no wind blowing
It sifts gently down,
Enclosing my world in
A cool white down,
A tenderness of snowing.
It falls and falls like sleep
Till wakeful eyes can close
On all the waste and loss
As peace comes in and flows,
Snow-dreaming what I keep.
Silence assumes the air
And the five senses all
Are wafted on the fall
To somewhere magical
Beyond hope and despair.
There is nothing to do
But drift now, more or less
On some great lovingness,
On something that does bless,
The silent, tender snow.